editorial

The State Department, through the U.S. Mission to India, is offering a $35,000 grant to develop a workshop for "sharing ideas on the role of editorial cartooning in India and the United States in creating public dialogue" with "print and broadcast journalists, bloggers, citizen journalists, and journalism students." The grant offer, titled "Cartooning for Cause," gives a brief history of editorial cartooning in India:

Throughout the history of journalism, cartoonists have used humor and satire as a means to create meaningful public discourse. India, like the United States, has a rich history of cartooning. The late eminent author, journalist and cartoonist R.K. Laxman’s cartoon character “The Common Man” was published every day in major newspapers beginning in 1951. Over half a century, “The Common Man” represented the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and the foibles of the average Indian through the daily comic strip “You Said It.” Even with the advent of the Internet, animation and digital technology, cartoons are still used very effectively by intellectuals in both countries and around the world today. It is important that the next generation keeps this tradition of cartooning alive and makes it relevant to the 21st century.

The State Department is soliciting proposals for either a single workshop in Chennai, India, or one that includes additional workshops in other cities. The grant documents note that "[t]he awardee is encouraged to seek and find additional funding for this project, subject to approval by the U.S. Consulate General, Chennai and U.S. Embassy New Delhi."

This past week, at least a dozen French people, most of them journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were gunned down during an editorial meeting by the brothers Chérif and Said Kouachi, two French Muslims who may have returned recently from waging jihad in Syria. French citizens crowded into public squares across the country to vent their grief and wave signs reading “I am Charlie.” Foreign leaders professed their willingness to rally behind the values that France shares with the West.

As we go to press, the White House has reportedly offered Iran a deal regarding its nuclear program, a framework agreement with details to be worked out in the coming months. However, even as the interim agreement is set to expire November 24, it seems the Iranians have not responded to the Obama administration’s offer. And why would they? The White House has made it clear it wants a deal more than the Islamic Republic does. Under the circumstances, why wouldn’t Tehran wait to see how many more U.S. concessions it can extract?

First, celebration. Republicans are sober and conservatives are . . . conservative. Neither group has a reputation as party animals. But The Weekly Standard gives them permission—nay, we urge them with the full authority of our weighty editorial voice—to let themselves go for one night. Pop the champagne corks. Put on the party hats. Go wild with the funny little noisemakers.

How to introduce students to conservative thought? It’s hard. The colleges and universities aren’t interested. The media and popular culture are hostile. What if young Americans nonetheless become aware of the existence of such a thing as conservative thought? How to convey its varieties and complexities? Even tougher. You can write articles and put things online, but there’s an awful lot competing for young people’s attention these days.

But there’s good news nonetheless. Help has arrived. Its name? President Barack Obama.

Last week Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the U.N. General Assembly and the White House to warn against letting Iran become a nuclear threshold state. He may be too late. With the Obama administration walking back its longstanding demand that Iran dismantle its centrifuges, the clerical regime in Tehran will soon be on the threshold of a nuclear breakout.

This fact is not lost on the White House. Recent appointments and statements underscore the administration’s new posture toward Iran—détente.

Republican voters are down on the sluggish GOP officials they elected, and the officeholders whine about the unreasonable people who voted for them. Republican backbenchers complain about their lame leaders, and GOP leaders grumble about their unruly followers. Right-wing pundits despair of unimaginative Republican pols, and the hard-headed pols are impatient with impractical commentators. Conservative activists loathe the GOP establishment, and the establishment is terrified and contemptuous of the base.

Pundits throw out all sorts of numbers to explain the Republican defeat in the 2012 presidential election. So here’s our number: $65,000. That is a rough estimate of the household income of the average 2012 voter. Republicans lost because Mitt Romney did not do well enough with this voter or those near him on the income scale.

"Rooting out a cancer like ISIL won’t be easy and it won’t be quick,” President Obama told the American Legion’s annual convention in Charlotte on Tuesday, August 26. He repeated the thought in his pre-Labor Day weekend press conference on August 28. A week before, the day after the murder of James Foley, Obama had remarked, “From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread.”

On Tuesday, August 19, an American citizen, James Foley, was savagely killed. The group of jihadists known as ISIL had previously killed and brutalized tens of thousands of non-Americans. But they killed Foley because he was an American. They titled the grotesque video of this particular act of barbarism “A message to America.”

It was something of a puzzle, according to the headline in the August 7 New York Times: “Islamic Militants in Iraq Are Widely Loathed, Yet Action to Curb Them Is Elusive.” On the one hand, the article pointed out, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, “is on nearly every nation’s public enemy list, as well as the United Nations’ list of terrorist organizations facing sanctions.” What’s more, ISIS’s barbarism has been publicized and its threat to others is clear.

In the largest turnout in a congressional primary in the history of Virginia politics, the voters of the Commonwealth’s 7th Congressional District last Tuesday decisively chose not to renominate their seven-term representative, now serving as House majority leader, who had massively outspent his little-known challenger.